I came out of the Willem-Alexander Pavilion with a vague piece of information and no map sense whatsoever. Somebody had mentioned an orchid exhibition. I had no idea where it was, so …

I had seen this painting perhaps four hundred times before I ever saw it. On fridge magnets, on tea towels, on postcards in every souvenir shop between Centraal and the Bloemenmarkt in …

I went up on King’s Day. That is the twenty-seventh of April, the loudest day of the Dutch year, and by early afternoon the canal below the brewery was full of boats …

In Amsterdam I went looking for stroopwafels and found them, at Hans Egstorf on the Singel. What I had never done, on that trip or any other, was eat a Dutch pancake. …

I had clogs filed under souvenir. Blue and white, palm-sized, sold in every shop between Dam Square and Centraal in Amsterdam. That was the whole of my thinking on the subject until …

I did not know the Netherlands was a cheese country. That is an embarrassing sentence to write. I had walked past Gouda and Edam in supermarkets my entire adult life without once …

I saw Zaanse Schans because it came attached to something else. The tour I booked bundled Keukenhof with an afternoon here, which is why I had half a day in the tulip …

I had walked through Vondelpark in Amsterdam several times before I ever ate there. In April the pond carries floating beds of tulips, planted on black rafts and set out across the …

I have three of these on a shelf at home. They came from KLM flights, they are filled with Dutch gin, and each one is a scale model of a real building …

I walked into this building thinking I was looking at lilies. I walked out knowing I was not, and the correction came from a small white card on a plinth. That is …

I support Mercedes. I mention this because the last stretch of the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam is essentially a shrine to a Red Bull driver, and I walked into it as a …

I studied history. That is most of the explanation for this blog, and it is the whole explanation for why I will happily give an hour to one room in the Rijksmuseum …